Channel
Interviewed Person
Guillermo Rauch
Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel and creator of Next.js, reveals exactly how he uses V0 to build products, pitch ideas, and ship features at startup speed. In this episode, he opens his personal V0 workflow, walks through the creation of his viral AI camera app (built in one afternoon), and shares a vault of free startup ideas you can build today, including conversational forms, AI opinion tracking, and multi-model research tools. This is a rare look inside how one of the most successful founders thinks about taste, execution, and turning ideas into reality. *Timestamps* 00:00 – Intro 02:01 – Inside Guillermo's V0 Workflow 10:56 – Startup Idea 1: The AI camera App 19:33 – Advice for building taste and generating ideas 22:56 – Visualizing products in your head before prompting 28:21 – Startup Idea 2: AI Forms 37:34 – v0’s AI SDK 41:55 – Startup Idea 3: Notion-style document tool with promptable blocks 43:53 – Startup Idea 4: LLM Vibes Radar 46:26 – Startup Idea 5: Deepest research *Key Points* * Guillermo uses V0 to prototype, pitch, and refine products—often building functional demos in 15-30 minutes * The viral AI camera app was built during a lunch break as proof that Nano Banana is a "GPT-4 moment for image models" * Forms are underrated primitives of the internet and ripe for AI disruption through conversational interfaces * Always work backwards from the ideal interface, not from technical constraints * Fewer pixels are always better—delete until only the essential remains * Dedicated tools with their own URL and interface can outcompete "modes" in larger products Numbered Section Summaries 1. **Inside the V0 Workspace: How Guillermo Ships** Guillermo opens his personal V0 workspace to show exactly how he uses the tool daily. He creates complex data visualizations to explain infrastructure concepts to customers, redesigns blog components to pitch ideas to his team, and prototypes landing pages during Waymo rides. The key insight: showing product beats making decks. He demonstrates how he can move from idea to high-fidelity demo in minutes, enabling faster team alignment and customer conversations. 2. **The AI Camera Origin Story** Frustrated by his relative's terrible moon photos and his own iPhone's declining camera quality, Guillermo had an insight: cameras will become inputs, not outputs, because every photo will eventually pass through an AI model. He pitched the idea internally, got initial skepticism, but pushed through. During a Nano Banana launch, he worked with his team to build the full app in an afternoon—complete with Instagram-inspired filters. The app went viral and became his go-to demo for enterprise pitches. 3. **The Value of Ideas in the AI Age** Guillermo argues that in the age of AI, the value of ideas has become "pretty freaking significant." He shares his process of accumulating exposure hours to products, observing how people use tools in the real world, and constantly rethinking assumptions. The key is being able to visualize things clearly in your head and explain them well in English. He emphasizes that most ideas start as bad ideas, but building a filter for what might work is part of the process. 4. **The Free Ideas Vault: Forms, Research, and More** Guillermo walks through his viral free ideas threads, focusing on three big opportunities. First: AI-native forms that use conversation for both creation and submission. Second: the "LLM Vibes Radar" that tracks how AI opinions and rankings change over time, exposing biases and riding news cycles. Third: "deepest research"—a tool that queries every available AI to produce comprehensive reports and highlights where models disagree. Each idea targets an underrated primitive of the internet. Links & Resources * V0 — https://v0.app/ * V0 Community Templates — https://v0.app/templates * AI Camera Demo — https://v0bananacam.vercel.app/ * Vercel AI SDK — https://ai-sdk.dev/ * AI Gateway — https://vercel.com/ai * Vercel Template Marketplace — https://vercel.com/templates * Next.js — https://nextjs.org/ The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com/ LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: boringmarketing.com The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - get your free builders toolkit to build cashflowing business - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire-toolkit Become a member - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND GUILLERMO ON SOCIAL v0: https://v0.app/ X/Twitter: https://x.com/rauchg
I sat down with Guermo, the founder of Verscell, which is a $9 billion company. In this conversation, he dropped three powerful startup ideas that really got me to stop and think. We also went through Vzero, his vibe coding product, to tell us how to make money from it, how to build software from it, and how to use it to the best of its capabilities. I always find when you sit down with the founder of these vibe coding tools, they really, really give you the sauce around how to fine-tune it so you get the most out of it. I'm not
sponsored by Versel. I have no relationship with them. Just thought it would be cool to give you some ideas, see how their platform works. I hope you find it interesting. At the end of the episode, I bought a domain that I'm giving away to one of you. I think it's an incredible domain that all you got to do if you want it, like and comment and I'm going to pick one person, one person randomly to give it away. Um, I can't wait to see what you build. Enjoy the episode. [Music]
We got GMO on the pod from Versel. GMO, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? Well, hopefully they're going to learn a little bit about my system, how I think, how I use our own tools, how I prototype, how I come up with ideas. I have some ideas that I think are good, maybe most are bad, but some might be gems for some of the listeners. Yeah, I like to uh work
in public a lot at we do a ton with open source. Maybe I'll share some of the things that we've been open sourcing that can be great starting points for people that are entrepreneurial. And yeah, cool. And I just asked for one little commitment from you. You know, on this on this podcast, we talk about sauce. You know, giving the sauce to the people so that they can, you know, can you commit to giving the sauce? All sauce. All sauce. I'm all sauce. All sauce. No breaks. Yeah. Okay, let's do it.
Let's go. Let's Let's Let's rip. All right. So, Greg, how familiar are you with Vzero? I'm pretty familiar. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I I think I've seen some of your tweets. Uh so what you're looking at here, in case you're not familiar, is uh the Versel workspace for VZero. So I'm literally showing you like all this awesome, right? Like our our own uh workspace, how we use Vzero, but you're looking at the favorites, which are mine. Obviously, I created a couple things that I wanted to show you all. So, and by the way, funny little behind
thes scenes thing. This is how I pitch product. We have a lot of huge enterprises using Vzero. Yesterday I met with one of the world's largest companies. Um they came to the office and I basically did a version of this. So it's also a little bit of advice for for people watching like how do you sell like do you do decks? Like I try to show product as much as I can. So I'll walk you through a few things that I've created. So one that's one use case of Vzero that's really interesting is free
form data visualization. So it's really hard sometimes to explain complex technical concepts that have to do with different things of the versel infrastructure etc to customers. So I use v 0ero a lot to basically give some prompt ideas and then come up with like unique visualizations. So like what you're looking at here is that something that I think could have taken me quite
quite a long time to create with like slides or whatever and and and the AI walked me through how to represent this you know how our fluid compute system works and uh create something that I can hand off to other teams. I can hand off to customers can hand off you know I can further solidify my understanding of technical concepts. I actually use Vzero for learning a lot. Uh so that's a fun one. I'm actually really proud of this one that you're going to look at now.
